The Library of Early Modern Women’s Marginalia uses the term agent rather than author in order to capture the range of roles – authorial and extra-authorial – that women took up as marginalists. These include book owner, book user, reader, translator, editor, writer, artist and student. This expanded range of roles means that our database uncovers many women marginalists from non-elite, or below-gentry, backgrounds, about whom little biographical information exists, as well as revealing the extent to which some elite women annotated their books, collecting multiple examples of marginalia across volumes and repositories.
We include the same information for every agent in the database. This includes name, in the format of first name followed by surname if provided, and the number of marks that agent made. The majority of agents in the database only have one marginal mark associated with them, although some outliers, such as Isabella Hervey, left evidence of over a hundred and eighty separate marginal marks.
Because the project team has collected marginalia from over a hundred repositories, we have been able to gather evidence about women agents who annotated more than one book. One of the exciting findings of our project has been reconstructing the libraries of women who might have owned a handful of books which have now been dispersed across the globe. Most of these women are unknown, but their small libraries allow us to better understand the number and kind of books non-elite women might have owned or had access to, as well as how they used these books. Anne Tempe, for example, owned two books related to the English civil war: an historical tract by the parliamentarians, John Wittewrong’s The copy of a letter from Alisbury (London, 1643) and a sermon presented to the House of Commons, Edmund Calamy’s Englands Antidote, against the plague of civil warre (London, 1645). Mary Wentworth owned a copy of Edmund Spenser’s 1615 The Faerie Queene, held in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and a 1679 copy of a sermon by Augustin Medcalf, now held across the Atlantic in the Folger Shakespeare library. Elizabeth Webb owned a copy of the 1613 Book of Common Prayernow held in Fisher Library at the University of Toronto, and Barnabe Rich’s Rich his farewell to militarie (London, 1594) also held in the Folger Shakespeare Library.
The database also allows us to track the number of marks a woman made within a single book, showing that some women were active and varied marginalists and took up multiple roles in their annotations. We have also recorded instances when women gave or received a book as a gift, or where there is some other indication of their interaction with the book (for example as witness to a signature). Finally, if a marginal mark by a woman is dated, we record this as ‘Agent date’, to provide at least some information about the historical agent in our database. This might be some of the only information that we have about some of the marginalists in the archive. For women with known biographies, this category of Agent date can reveal when a book was purchased or claimed as part of a library. As the visualisation below shows, most dated records are ownership marks. However, women also occasionally dated their annotations, added text, graffiti, and marks of recording, allowing marginalia to be linked to specific historical moments, political events and shifts in an agent’s personal circumstances.